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Proportionate 





Giving 


By 
ROBERT E. SPEER 


INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT 
OF NORTH AMERICA 


45 West 187u Street New York City 


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45 West 18TH STREET 





Proportionate 
per OF PRINGE 





By 


ROBERT E. SPEER 


THE boldness of your chal- 
lenge is inspiring. It is a 
challenge not merely for the 
money with its tremendous 
power, but to the hearts and 
lives of American Protestants to 
respond to the World’s need in 
this great crisis hour of the 
World’s history. For the “‘first 
fruits” are earnest money; it 
pledges anew the devotion of the 


whole life. S. D. Gorpon. 


INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT 


OF NORTH AMERICA 









New York City 


Price, 3 cents each, 30 cents 
per dozen, $2.00 per hundred 


Proportionate Giving 


ROBERT E. SPEER 


E HAVE great grounds for encourage- 

ment and thanksgiving as we come 
together in this conference today. The prog- 
ress that has been made in the last ten or 
fifteen years in the acceptance of better 
methods of giving throughout the Church has 
been a progress far in excess of the hopes of 
many of those who have been most active in 
this campaign. Mr. McConaughy stated that 
about sixty per cent. of all our churches of 
twenty-five members or over have already 
adopted in some form the new and better 
plans of giving. It is quite true that these 
plans have not been adopted in their complete- 
ness in all these churches, but it represents a 
great gain that three-fifths of the churches of 
over twenty-five members have responded to 
the reasonable presentations that have been 
made on behalf of this movement in these past 
few years. 


It is a further ground of encouragement that 
there has been such a great advance in the 
amount of giving as an inevitable result of this 
wider adoption of good plans. The gifts of the 
churches in their church offerings as well as 
through every other channel of benevolence 
have advanced immensely in the last fifteen 


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PROPORTIONATE Givinc 


years, and, while in this, as in every such 
movement, many causes enter in, it cannot be 
denied that the work that is being done in this 
particular direction has contributed perhaps as 
largely as any other cause to this increase. 

It is a still further ground of encouragement 
that such a spirit of common understanding 
and unity of feeling and purpose pervades the 
Church and all the missionary agencies of the 
Church today, and that we can gather here in 
this Conference this morning and this after- 
noon in the interest of all the activities of the 
Church, conscious of their unity and eager 
only that the whole work of the Church should 
be done. 

Further occasions of thanksgiving and grati- 
tude might easily be added to these, but there 
are some things that need to be set down on 
the other side of the account, and which as 
honest and sincere men we are anxious to deal 
with. 

For one thing, the increase of gifts has been 
woefully inadequate, and, measured against 
the possibilities and opportunities of today, it 
is a question whether we are in a much better 
position than ten or fifteen years ago. The 
advance that has been made has been utterly 
inadequate. Secondly, it is not only open to 
question, probably it is indisputable, that the 

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PROPORTIONATE GIVING 


increased giving has not kept pace with our 
increased ability to give. Doubtless with many 
here in this room today there has been no in~ 
creased ability to give, but when we look at 
the Church as a whole and at the country asa 
whole the possibility of giving has doubled or 
quadrupled as compared with what it was ten 
or fifteen years ago. What is given represents 
a smaller proportion of what could be given 
now than it represented ten or fifteen or forty 
or seventy-five years ago. Still further is the 
possibility of danger latent in the very hope- 
fulness of our present situation. We may 
satisfy the churches with the adoption of a 
partial program and their satisfaction may 
make them unwilling to adopt the other ele- 
ments of the program. After all, systematic 
giving is only methodical giving. It does not 
follow that it is righteous giving—adequate 
giving. We might lead ourselves into an in- 
jurious situation if all that we are accomplish- 
ing now should make habitual with the Church 
an inadequate performance of her duty. It 
seems to me that the Church stands face to 
face with a very dangerous situation in this 
regard, and that we are bound to take it upon 
us now to re-examine here our undertaking 
and to see whether we are actually leading the 
churches to adopt those elements of a program 


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PROPOR CSU Rik tes 


which are the most vital and fundamental 
ones. And now is the time for us to do this 
because it is a fact that the introduction of 
one new radical idea makes it easier to intro- 
duce also other ideas, when the mind of the 
Church is jarred open and she begins to adopt 
plans of action that come closer to the ideal. 

The question that has troubled a great many 
men throughout the Church with regard to our 
present movement is, how can we combine 
with the general acceptance of the method of 
systematic giving the acceptance also of a liv- 
ing principle of proportionate giving. For after 
all system is only a matter of method, not 
essentially a matter of principle. What we 
wish to introduce is some living and uplifting 
principle. We believe that this can only be 
found in the acceptance of the Christian 
principle of stewardship; of giving not only on 
a methodical basis but on a basis of just 
proportion. But in this as in everything 
general principles do not sufficiently bite. The 
principle needs to carry with itself some form 
of application by which it can be easily re- 
lated at once to action on the part of common 
Christian men and women. What I want to 
say is in behalf of the acceptance of the princi- 
ple of tithe giving as the practical basis of 
proportionate giving. 


seg ae 


PROPORTIONATE GIVING 


Let us lay aside at the outset all legal ideas. 
There is no such thing as the law of the tithe. 
There is a principle of the tithe. Let us dismiss 
from our minds once and for all every legalistic 
and statutory idea in the Kingdom of God. 
The wrong of committing murder does not 
consist in the fact that the ten commandments 
forbid it. The ten commandments forbid it 
because it is wrong. Right and wrong lie on 
fundamental foundations beneath statutes. 
They are right and wrong not because God 
says so but because of God’s character. This 
matter of tithe giving we are not to think 
of as a symbol of legal Judaism. Its claim 
upon us rests upon moral considerations that 
would have made tithe giving the duty of man 
even if the Jewish law had not been enacted. 
Revelation does not create moral ideals; it 
only expresses moral ideals that lie in the will 
of God. If the principle of the tithe is to be 
operative in the present day, accordingly it 
must be operative because of the broad moral 
considerations that underlie it, which, as a 
matter of fact, made the principle of tithe 
giving operative long before it was ever ex- 
pressed in any of the legal enactments of the 
Old Testament legislation. We read in the 
Epistle to the Hebrews that the principle was 
held to have existed in life long before the legis- 

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PROPORTIONATE GIVING 


lation came into being. Just so the observance 
of the Sabbath Day does not rest for us upon 
the fourth commandment; it would be just as 
valid and real to us today if we had never had 
any decalogue at all. ‘The life principle and 
privilege of the tithe is a working scheme of 
proportionate giving by which we can make 
the principle of stewardship actual and living. 
I should like to suggest just a few of these 
practical moral considerations on which it 
rests. 

First of all, the gospel ought to lead and 
enable men to do more than pagans and Jews. 
The Jew in the old dispensation was expected 
to bring his tithe in addition to his taxes and 
his various offerings. The generosity of many 
pagans equals the old Jewish standards. We 
do not need to enter into the motives that led 
them to give. The mere fact is that many of 
the non-Christian people, like the Jews, have 
given much more than tithes. Now our Lord 
said unequivocally that principles were to 
be judged by their results; that modes and 
motives of action cannot claim the allegiance 
of man because of any beauty of their ex- 
pression. By their fruits they were to be 
tested. Unless the motives of the gospel are 
able to lead men to give more generously than 
Jews and pagans gave, then the motives of the 


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PROPORTIONATE GIVING 


Gospel must be inferior to Judaism and 
paganism. 

Secondly, the Jew and the pagan faced no 
less difficulties in the way of practising a princi- 
ple like this than we face. We face no greater 
difficulties than they faced. As a matter of 
fact they did face greater difficulties than we. 
The Jew was a poor man and lived in a 
poor land. He had no such currency passing 
through his hands as passes through ours. He 
gave of his orchards and fields or he set aside 
one-tenth of his soil that its produce might 
be regarded as not his own, but God’s. If 
these men then, and these men now, out in 
those darkened lands will override this diffi- 
culty, and in spite of poverty and limitation 
will do this, it is not asking or expecting too 
much that Christian men should do so. The 
charges that are laid upon us to be borne 
are trivial compared with the charges laid 
upon the Jews in the olden day. 

Vhirdly, we need some practical abiding 
principle like this to make sure that the princi- 
ple of stewardship is a reality in our lives and 
that we do not inwardly find ourselves swept 
into self-deception. lt is the easiest thing in 
the world for a man who does not deal with 
God in the matter of obligation as he does with 
his fellows to find that hz has not been giving 


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PROPOR TIORATS CGrvinGc 


God his due. [ will yust ask any man who is 
here in this room this morning who has adopted 
the minimum principle of the tithe if he did 
not discover that in the old days he was out- 
rageously robbing God. Just exactly as we 
need the Sabbath for some such purpose as 
this to make sure of the recognition of all 
time as sacred to the Lord of Life, just so do 
we need the recognition of our tithe obligation 
to God in the matter of our wealth. 

In the fourth place, God never would have 
ordered it, 1f 1t had been a mere transitory 
matter: 1f it had not been for our good. He 
does not need tithes for himself. All ten-tenths 
of our wealth he can take away if he pleases. 
The principle of tithe giving is needed by man. 
He made it clear not as something for that 
time only but as something for all time. Man’s 
moral constitution has not altered. The fact 
that it was good for man three thousand years 
ago is an evidence that it is good for man still. 
Our moral nature is the same across the lands 
and across the centuries, and the old principle 
was not a principle that belonged to a particu- 
lar epoch; it was a principle that lay deep in 
human nature. That is why Mr. Ruskin 
speaks as he does in the “Seven Lamps of 
Architecture:” 

“And let us not now lose sight of this broad 

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PROPORTIONATE GIVING 


and unabrogated principle—I might say in- 
capable of being abrogated so long as men shall 
receive earthly gifts from God. Of all that 
they have His tithe must be rendered to Him, 
or insofar and insomuch He is forgotten; of 
the skill and of the treasure, of the strength 
and of the mind, of the time, and of the toil 
offering must be made reverently; and if there 
be any difference between the Levitical and 
the Christian offering, it is that the latter may 
be just so much the wider in its range as it is 
typical in its meaning, as it is thankful instead 
of sacrificial.” 


Fifthly, money is the most perilous thing with 
which we have to cope, next to the baser, 
sensual nature. It is one of the most dangerous 
forces with which we have to deal. Money; we 
all know how perilous it is, how constantly 
through the New Testament the warnings are 
given. As Ruskin says in “Time and Tide:” 


“First, have you observed that all Christ’s 
main teachings by direct order, by earnest 
parable, and by His own permanent emotion, 
regard the use and misuse of money? We 
might have thought, if we had been asked what 
a divine teacher was most likely to teach, 
that He would have left inferior persons to 
give directions about money; and Himself 
spoken only concerning faith and love, and the 
discipline of the passions, and the guilt of the 
crimes of soul against soul. But not so. He 
speaks in general terms of these. But He 
does not speak parables about them for all 
men’s memory, nor permit Himself fierce 
indignation against them, in all men’s sight. 


ana daca 


PROPORTIONATE GIVING 


The Pharisees bring Him an adultress. He 
writes her forgiveness on the dust of which 
He had formed her. Another despised of all 
for known sin, He recognized as a giver of un- 
known love. But He acknowledges no love 
in buyers and sellers in His house. One should 
have thought there were people in that house 
twenty times worse than they; Caiaphas and 
his like—false priests, false prayer-makers 
false leaders of the people—who needed put- 
ting to silence, or to flight, with darkest 
wrath. But the scourge is only against 
traffickers and thieves. The two most intense 
of all the parables; the two which lead the rest 
in love and in terror (this of the Prodigal, and 
of Dives) relate, both of them, to the manage- 
ment of riches. The practical order given to 
the only seeker of advice, of whom it 1S re- 
corded that Christ ‘loved him,’ is briefly about 
his property. ‘Sell that thou hast.’’ 


So it was throughout ali our Lord’s teaching. 
He realized that some of the sources of deepest 
peril to man in one sense lay in money. In 
order to escape that peril, we need the pro- 
tecting grasp of some great and secure princi- 
ple. Who does not know how serious this need 
is? We can think of friend after friend who 
in these last years has had wealth piled in upon 
him, and we have seen the spiritual atrophy, 
unless he clung to some simple principle of 
action like this to hold him secure. 

In the sixth place, our Lord himself recognized 
and approved the validity of the principle of the 


PROPORTIONATE GIVING 


tithe. He said to the Scribes and the Pharisees: 
“You give tithes, and this you ought to have 
done.”” So many times now do we say that 
the Old Testament laws are abrogated in 
Christ. The types and shadows were fulfilled 
and terminated in Christ, but the moral law 
was not terminated in Christ. None of these 
moral ideals did Christ abrogate. He rein- 
forced and sanctioned every one of them, and 
poured upon each one of them the burden of a 
greater obligation. He explicitly endorsed the 
tithe. “You give tithes, and this ought you 
to have done.” 

Seventhly, there 1s no objection that holds 
against the principle of the tithe that does not 
hold also against the principle of the Sabbath 
Day. Both rest on the same ground of Old 
Testament sanction, New Testament recogni- 
tion, moral claim and adaptation. And, if the 
Sabbath had fallen into neglect as the tithe has 
done, the same arguments would be raised 
against its revival which are raised against the 
tithe. And the gains of Sabbath keeping are 
the gains of tithe giving too. I leave it to 
every one of you if the scrupulous recognition 
of the Sabbath Day does not pour a holiness 
over a man’s conception of trusteeship in 
regard to all his time. It is said by some that 
the conception is legalistic and cramping. Is 

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PROPORTIONATE GIVING 


the law of the Sabbath legalistic and cramp- 
ing? We look back with joy in our own lives 
to the principle of the Sabbath; to its emanci- 
pation of the soul from the serfdom of trivial 
and visible things; to its recognition of our 
glorious freedom, our right to take our hand 
off our common tasks one day in seven and to 
use it in the fellowship and worship of God. 
Every argument for keeping the Sabbath Day 
holy upholds the principle of the tithe. 
Eighth, it ts the only sure way of giving God 
his right share. If we say with regard to every 
other obligation, “Now I will scrupulously 
regard that what I owe to every other creditor 
I will certainly pay;” and then take the view 
that for the Lord of All we will pick up the 
crumbs that are left at the end, the chance is 
that He will get less than His right in what 
we have to give and spend. The only sure 
way of securing to the uses of God in the ex- 
tension of His kingdom what it needs is to 
set aside carefully for Him the first tenth. I 
wonder sometimes whether that instinct did 
not account for the change in the Lord’s Day 
We from theseventh to the first day of the week. 
are often hard put toit, to give our Scriptural 
grounds for the change. If you rest it on any 
legalistic grounds, the Old Testament prmciple 
is clear—the seventh day. Why did the Chris- 
By Pre 


PROPORTIONATE GIVING 


tians swing around to the first? First, the 
memories of the resurrection; second, there 
was the feeling, “Perhaps I may not have the 
seventh day this week. I will make sure that 
God has his day before anybody else. ‘The first 
I will give to Him.” And through the years 
the Christian conscience has insisted that it 
must be so. The same instinct will govern 
our hearts, if we allow it, in regard to our 
wealth, which is only time and strength em- 
bodied in a transportable asset. 

Ninth, it is only so that the causes of Christ 
in the world will get what they need. They 
never will get it by any mere system, never by 
any haphazard method, by allowing every man 
to whittle out his own principle; it will only 
be when the whole Church generously yields 
itself to some corporate principle that bears a 
definite relation to all its life. The general 
adoption of the principle of the tithe through- 
out the Church would pour into all the treasur- 
ies of the agencies of the Church and the great 
philanthropies and movements of charity and 
good will all that they would need for the 
work that must be done, and we shall not be — 
likely to accomplish it in any but this simple, 
fundamental, ethical way. 

Tenth, I think every man will find, as every 
man who has passed through the experience 


PROP.OR TLONATE: Gi LNG 


can: testify, that the acceptance of a principle 
like this marks a distinct era of spiritual enlarge- 
ment in his life. It carries him forward and 
leads him out intoa wider expanse. The whole 
thought of God’s love and presence and human 
duty becomes more vivid. I am not speaking 
here out of the air. I am speaking out of the 
experience of many in this room who look back 
to such a time as marking the beginning of a 
new era in their lives. 

In the eleventh place, 1t may bring the great 
religious expansion and awakening for which we 
long. 

“Bring ye the whole tithe into the store- 
house, that there may be food in my house, 
and prove me now herewith, saith Jehovah 
of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of 
heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that 
there shall not be room enough to receive it.” 


(MaL. 3:10) 

I suppose we have many times stumbled at 
Horace Bushnell’s word on this subject and 
wondered whether for once one of the greatest 
spiritual voices of his time had not missed the 
true note when he said: “One more revival, 
only once more is needed, the revival of 
Christian stewardship, the consecration of the 
money power to God. When that revival 
comes the Kingdom of God will come in a 
But may this not be true? Mr. Glad- 


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day. 
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PROPORTIONATE GIVING 


stone even went so far as to say: “I believe 
that the diffusion of the principle and practice 
of systematic beneficence will prove the moral 
specific of our age.” 

Lastly, I believe in this principle because, re- 
gardless of anything that will flow from it, 7¢ 
is fundamentally right. It does not matter 
what effect it may have on our lives, whether 
it pinches or cramps. We believe in it because 
we think it is right. I liked a letter that 
appeared in the Sunday School Times a few 
years ago. A number of letters had been 
published telling of the prosperity which had 
followed the adoption of tithe giving. One 
man wrote that he had an utterly contrary 
experience from the rest, and told a long story 
of the struggle that he had undergone, grow- 
ing harder and harder even since he had 
adopted that principle. Shortly after there 
was a letter frem Canada which said that what 
the last man wrote, who had done it because 
it was right in spite of the hardship it brought, 
had touched the writer as no experience of 
prosperity had done, and he also had begun 
what clearly seemed to him now the thing to 
do because, and only because, it was right. 

I do not mean to say that the privilege of 
giving a tithe is all that there is to propor- 
tionate giving, or that it exhausts the principle 


PROPORTIONATE CGHY ING 


of stewardship. There will be men whose duty 
and privilege it will be to give two-tenths or 
nine-tenths. I am only setting forth some of 
the reasons for believing that the practice of 
the tithe is the best method for securing the 
principle of stewardship an initial grip of 
reality on life. 

Let me lay the emphasis lastly on the rich 
privilege of being justified in giving at least a 
tenth of ourincome. I havea right to take all 
the money that comes to me and before I do 
anything whatever with any of it to set aside a 
tenth for the Lord. What a joy that brings 
into life, that we may simply act as banker for 
God with reference to this, to spend for His 
work. Mr. Gladstone wrote of this to a son 
who was then in residence at Oxford Univer- 
sity, in which he suggested eight rules, the 
observance of which would be conducive to 
the highest interests of his son’s life, literary 
and moral and spiritual. Among the sugges- 
tions was the following on the use of money: 

“In regard to money—there is a great ad- 
vantage in its methodical use. Especially is 
it wise to dedicate a certain portion of our 
means to purposes of charity and religion, and 
this is more easily begun in youth than in 
after-life. The greatest advantage of making 
a little fund of this kind is that when we are 


asked to give, competition is not between self 
on the one hand and any charity on the other, 


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PROPORTIONATE GIVING 


but between the different purposes of religion 
and charity with one another, among which 
we ought to make the most careful choice. 
It is desirable that the tenth of our means be 
dedicated to God, and it tends to bring a 
blessing on the rest. No one can tell the rich- 
ness of the blessings that come to those who 
thus honor the Lord with their substance.” 

This practice delivers one from the worry 
of debating every separate appeal that comes, 
and it makes him a free and glad trustee. 

I can remember still the very hour that all 
this first pressed on me in 1892 in the old First 
Church at Auburn. Horace Pitkin, who was 
then a student in the theological seminary, 
who later died as one of the martyrs in the 
Boxer tempest in China, read a paper on 
proportionate giving and the principle of the 
tithe. I never had seen this truth until that 
morning, and it burst on me as clear as sun- 
light that this was the right, the privilege and 
the duty of Christians. And if only the Chris- 
tian Church would come to it, my friends, what 
could we not do? 


Christian Stewardship Principles 


1. God is the owner of all things. 


2. Every man is a steward and must give 
account for all that is entrusted to him. 


3. God’s ownership and man’s stewardship 
ought to be acknowledged. 


4. This acknowledgment requires, as part of 
its expression, the setting apart for the ex- 
tension of the Kingdom of Christ such a 
portion of income as is recognized by the 


individual to be the Will of God.* 


5. Theseparated portion ought to be adminis- 
tered for the Kingdom of Christ and the 
remainder recognized as no less a trust. 

*In the Scriptures the tenth is recognized as suchacknowl- 
edgment. The proportion should increase as income in- 
creases. The Federal Income Tax Law exempts to 15 per 


cent. of income given for the purposes of religion, charity, 
etc. 


The Ten Million League 


The Ten Million League is a league of all 

ersons in every communion who, in loving 
(eee to their Lord, purpose to set apart a 
definite first propertion of income as an 
acknowledgment of God’s ownership and their 
stewardship. Each communion is to make its 
own interpretation of Christian stewardship 
principles, and the total enrolments will com- 

ose the final count of the army of Ten 
Milnes 


For further information address 
STEWARDSHIP DEPARTMENT 
INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT 
OF NORTH AMERICA 
45 West 18TH STREET New York City 





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